He looked at Tom now, as if to gauge his response. What he saw must have pleased him because he said, “I’m gonna let you in on a little secret. I’ve never told this to anyone, not even my mother...but you know what I’ve wanted almost all my life? More than anything?”
Tom thought:
The bastard is charming, I have to give him that.
But he said, “Tell me.”
“You laugh, I’ll—”
“
Tell
me.”
“My own pizza joint.”
Tom smiled, saying, “Dale’s Deep Dish?”
“My uncle Frank owned one for years and I always loved it there. Worked a bunch of summers for him until Ed started ragging me for smelling like anchovies and working for minimum wage. I’m telling you this because I want you to know how grateful I am to you for saving my ass back there.”
Tom thought that if anything about all of this was genuine, it was the man’s intense discomfort in this moment. Grinning, he said, “That was hard for you, wasn’t it.”
“Like pissing a peach pit.”
“In that case, you’re welcome.” Tom released a sigh of his own now, his mind turning again to the prospect of getting home. He said, “Man, this has been bar none the strangest day of my life.”
Cheered, Dale said, “Just another day at the office. I would
kill
for a big greasy Wendy’s burger right now.”
“Forget that. My wife’s lasagna. And a huge vat of Pepsi with crushed ice.”
“Mountain Dew.”
“I stand corrected.” Tom checked the dash clock: 10:03 P.M. “God, she must be frantic.”
“Your wife?”
“Yeah. Mandy. You know what my last thought was before I hit that cottage? It wasn’t fear. It was regret. That I’d never see my family again. Never meet my new son.”
But Dale’s attention had drifted. “Dale’s Deep Dish,” he said. “I like it. Three Ds. Needs a gimmick, though. Maybe give away free 3-D glasses...”
Tom said, “Sounds like a great—” and Dale said,
“Holy fuck,”
and sat ramrod straight in his seat, pointing out his side window into a copse of trees. “There’s a guy out there running buck naked through the woods.”
Not even bothering to check, Tom said, “You’re still high, aren’t you,” and Dale gave him an indignant ‘Who me?’ look. Tom said, “I saw the syringes.”
Smirking, Dale said, “Maybe a little.”
“Morphine?”
“Heroin,” Dale said. He looked over his shoulder into the pursuing darkness. “But I could have sworn...”
“You’re a piece of work,” Tom said, and Dale said, “That’s what my brother always says.”
They laughed a little then, but it had a strained quality now. Both men were exhausted.
“We still have a long way to go,” Tom said, not wanting to talk anymore, numbly perplexed at how he’d ended up chauffeuring a heroin addict out of the back country in a stolen vehicle, still trying to wrap his head around the fact that he’d killed a man and would somehow have to keep the truth of that to himself for the rest of his days. He said, “Maybe you should try and sleep it off.”
His attention obviously wandering again, Dale said, “You mind if I turn on the radio?” and Tom nodded his assent. “There might be something about your plane crash. Or the murders.”
As it turned out, there was nothing about either.
––––––––
Ronnie didn’t have long to wait. Sumit’s Mercedes rolled to a stop at the intersection less than twenty minutes into her stake-out, signaling a right hand turn onto the highway, its tinted windows making it impossible for her to see inside.
And she realized then that she’d been hoping to see Dale in there, alive and well in the back seat, when she knew without the faintest trace of a doubt that there was no way these guys were going to bring him home in one piece.
Fucking Dale
, she thought.
And fuck me for giving a shit.
She didn’t have a plan, but that didn’t concern her. If she was going to get her shit back from these two, it was going to be more about opportunity and thinking on her feet than any kind of plan. Whatever it was, it would have to be bold. Toronto was a five hour drive away, longer if the weather flared up again. Drop them at a gas bar, maybe. Or right now, when they pulled in to retrieve the Ram. The thought made her snicker.
Won’t get far in that fucking thing.
But they made the turn without pulling in and Ronnie was surprised, knowing how much Ed loved that drafty fucking truck. It put her hackles up.
She waited almost a minute, then rolled onto the highway in cautious pursuit.
––––––––
Sanj tucked his backup piece into the waist band of his pants and zipped up his overcoat. The rescue chopper was on the ice now and he didn’t want the crew coming into the cottage. He slipped Sumit’s lighter into his pants pocket and hurried out the front door, tucking his chin down against the wind as he plodded through the snow to the lake-facing side of the building.
Two SAR techs in bright orange flight suits were already making their way up the embankment from the chopper, one of them playing the moon-white beam of a flashlight over the wreckage of the Cessna.
Feigning a limp, Sanj moved toward them now, waving as they spotted him and the flash beam shifted to strike him in the face.
“Thank God,” he said, shading his eyes as the men hastened to close the distance. “I thought I was going to freeze to death up here.”
The techs had white name tags sewn onto the breast pockets of their flight suits: P. Jones and T. Carter. Jones was a little guy, mid twenties, maybe; but Carter, clearly the more experienced of the two, was big and looked like he could handle himself. Sanj decided to concentrate on Carter, who took the lead right away.
“Tom Stokes?” Carter said, looking skeptical.
Sanj said, “That’s me,” and it occurred to him then that he mustn’t look like much of a bush pilot standing out here in his suit and thousand dollar overcoat; but if we was going to hitch a ride out of here, he needed to convince these two, at least until he was on the aircraft.
Carter said, “Are you hurt? There’s blood on your neck.”
“Just a little ding on the back of the head,” Sanj said. “I got lucky.”
Both men were looking up at the wreckage now, the little guy saying, “Are there any others?”
“All alone,” Sanj said. “Glad to see you boys.”
Carter gave Jones a nod and the man started moving toward the cottage. Sanj stumbled into him and Jones grabbed his arm, Carter closing in on the opposite side to do the same.
“Actually,” Sanj said, “I’m feeling quite dizzy all of a sudden.”
“You might be going into shock,” Carter said. “Let’s get you aboard.”
Arms slung over the shoulders of his rescuers, Sanj let them lead him to the waiting chopper. The rotors were still spinning and Sanj was temporarily blinded by a tempest of ice pellets and snow.
Then he was on board, cuffing meltwater from his eyes while performing a quick assessment of his new environment: two pilots, a flight engineer in the rear of the aircraft and the two SAR guys. Crowd control might be an issue. He’d have to choose his moment.
But things were already beginning to unravel, Carter telling the Jones kid to run back up to the cottage and evaluate the scene, explaining to the rookie as he led Sanj to the treatment area that in spite of a victim’s assurances, it was important for the team to verify for themselves the presence or absence of further casualties, Carter saying that, particularly where head injuries were concerned, the on-site testimony of the victim might be erroneous or distorted by trauma or shock.
To further complicate matters, the pilot was talking on the radio now, mumbling shit Sanj couldn’t hear and eyeballing him like he had two heads.
The Jones kid was already halfway up the incline to the cottage.
Carter said, “Let’s get your coat off and get you up on the stretcher here,” and Sanj shot him in the knee. Carter went down hard and the flight engineer got to his feet. Sanj aimed the gun at him, saw that Jones had failed to hear the small caliber report over the chop of the rotors and shot the engineer in the left shoulder, shifting his aim to the cockpit as the engineer hit the deck.
“Hands, gentlemen,” Sanj said, stepping over Carter—on his back now, clutching his ruined knee—and the men raised their hands.
“What’s this about?” the pilot said.
“It’s about a new flight plan,” Sanj said and handed him the documents he’d retrieved from the Cessna. “Now let’s get this fucker airborne, shall we?”
The copilot said, “What about Jones?” and Sanj said, “I’d rate his chances higher out there.
“Now I need your wallets, boys. All of them.”
* * *
Once they were in the air, Sanj secured Carter to his seat with stout plastic cable-ties he kept in his coat for the purpose; the man’s kneecap was shattered but the bleeding wasn’t brisk enough to worry about him dying any time soon. He hadn’t decided yet what he was going to do with these guys, but wanted to keep them functional for the time being, in case he needed them.
Next he marched the engineer at gunpoint to the cockpit and held the gun to his temple, saying to the pilot, “Disable the radio or this man dies.”
The pilot switched the radio off.
Sanj said, “I said disable it,” and fired a round into the radio.
The pilot said, “
Hey.
Be careful with that thing or you’ll kill us all.”
“Consider that the next time I tell you to do something,” Sanj said. “Does this aircraft have a GPS tracking system?”
“ELT,” the pilot said. “Same principle.”
“Where is it?”
“In the back.”
To the copilot Sanj said, “You can fly this bird on your own, am I right?”
“Yes.”
Sanj gripped the flight engineer’s wounded shoulder and turned the man to face him. “Go get the ELT and make it quick,” he said. “Fuck around and I’ll put a bullet in your Captain’s skull.”
He turned next to Carter. “Now, let’s see about getting this head wound closed. Do a good job and I might let you and your buddies live.”
––––––––
Stirring as if from a trance, Mandy shifted in her chair, her hand going to the small of her back where a nasty kink had taken up residence. She leaned away from the pain, stretching to the limit her massive belly would allow, and gradually the discomfort subsided.
The snow was still coming down out there, but that fierce wind had tapered off, only the occasional gust now, twisting the dry flakes into ghostly eddies in the deck light.
She picked up her untouched coffee and, ignoring the oily little slick that had formed on its surface, took a tentative sip.
Cold.
She shivered and set the cup back in its saucer.
The radio emitted only static, as it had without interruption in the nearly four hours since her conversation with Captain Tremblay at Search and Rescue. The Captain had done his best to reassure her, smoothly reciting the expected platitudes, but Mandy could hear the resignation in his voice, in the carefully modulated tone intended to brace her in spite of his words. She was an experienced pilot herself; she understood the odds. But Tremblay didn’t know her husband. He’d come through much worse than this with a smile on his face and a great story to tell. Every fiber of her being told her that Tom was fine, probably sharing a beer right now with an ice fisherman in a cozy hut somewhere, sitting it out like she’d told him to. If she had any sense she’d go to bed, let him wake her in the morning with a bristly kiss—
Mandy stiffened in her chair, her ears perking up.
A helicopter...?
She rose stiffly and rounded the desk to the big window, gathering her robe around her in the night-time chill of the office. Once in a blue moon a domestic air ambulance flew over the lake on its way to the hospital in Sudbury, twenty miles away, but usually at altitude and rarely in this kind of weather. This chopper was heavier, almost military looking. And it was getting ready to land.
The aircraft hovered briefly at the edge of her line of site, five hundred meters away at the mouth of the bay, then angled off behind a line of conifers, moving farther up the lake.
Mandy settled back in her chair and used the landline to dial the direct number Captain Tremblay had given her.
––––––––
Sanj stood behind the pilot with his gun pressed to the man’s neck as the chopper touched down on the ice. They’d overflown Stokes Aviation on the way in, giving him a few seconds to get the lay of the land, then chosen a more remote spot further up the lake to set down.
He’d already gagged and cable-tied Carter and the engineer to a metal handrail in the rear of the aircraft, and as the chopper powered down he did the same to the pilots, giving them one of the speeches he reserved for this final act in the proceedings, the kind that used to amuse the shit out of Sumit, because no matter what he told any of the poor bastards unfortunate enough to be hearing it, the outcome was always the same.
But this time he wasn’t so sure. Without his brother here, it just didn’t feel right. And as much as he’d been doing his best to block out the horror of what had happened to the kid, he could feel some vital part of himself withering inside.
“If I was going to do this right,” he told them, “I’d waste every last one of you and set this noisy fucker on fire. But to be honest, I admire the work you do. Back home in India my father was a chest surgeon, and he would rise furious from the ashes if he knew of the savage path his sons had chosen. So you have him to thank for your lives. Remember that. My only hope is that he will forgive my brother Sumit when they meet before Ganesh.” He could see the men had no idea what he was talking about, but he was beyond caring; it just needed to be said. “I am the one who seduced him into this life. I am the one who should be dead.”
He stared into the eyes of each of the crew members in turn now, holding their gaze without blinking until each of them looked away. Then he said: “But if even one of you causes me grief of any kind, now or in the future...” He drew the men’s wallets from an inside coat pocket. “I know where you live. And even from prison, I can reach you.”